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Richard J. Powell

John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History

Education

Ph.D., Yale University 1988

M.Phil., Yale University 1984

M.A., Yale University 1982

M.F.A., Howard University 1977

B.A., Morehouse College 1975

Overview

Richard J. Powell is John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History at Duke University, where he has taught since 1989. He studied at Morehouse College and Howard University before earning his doctorate in art history at Yale University. Along with teaching courses in American art, the arts of the African Diaspora, and contemporary visual studies, he has written extensively on topics ranging from primitivism to postmodernism, including such titles asHomecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson(1991),Black Art: A Cultural History(1997 & 2002), andCutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture(2008).